Senior Moments – for week of August 8

Shrewsbury, Massachusetts – Cities are wonderful places for walking around and New York is perhaps the best of them all with its abundance of shops and things of interest to see and do while going to and from work or during lunch. Having lived there until age 35, working mainly in the downtown and midtown areas of Manhattan, I was forever being entertained by the city’s many sights and sounds.

One day while on my way to a customer and standing on a street corner waiting for the traffic light to turn green, a car stopped in front of me and the guy on the passenger’s side stuck a watch out the window for me to see, a Rolex in its display box, saying he’d sell it to me for $50. Now this was in the early 1960s when $50 was a lot of money, but a Rolex for that price was a steal, and surely that’s exactly what it was. Never being one to buy on impulse I refused his offer and the car drove away.

When getting to my destination I told someone about my experience and the person laughed, saying he didn’t know that such a scam was still going on. It seems that what the thieves were selling were indeed Rolexes, but only the cases which had been stolen. The insides of the watches were pure junk. Just as the old saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true it usually is.

Thinking about questionable things, I once worked with a skeptic who would never eat a hamburger or a cutlet, saying that since those things were ground or covered with egg he couldn’t tell what had been hidden inside, that if the ingredients were any good they wouldn’t have had to be disguised. Perhaps he was a little paranoid but as another old saying goes, better safe than sorry.

Oddly enough, what brought these things to mind was something I saw while waiting on line to pay for some food at the local supermarket, a headline in one of those lurid scandal rags about another of Kim Kardashian’s sexual misadventures. I was suddenly struck with the idea that how do we know a person called Kim Kardashian actually exists? Sure we see a woman with a huge bosom and an even huger backside on her own TV show or in photos on the Internet or in magazines, but like the phony Rolexes or the egg-coated cutlets, is there anything real or of value under her façade?

After all, she isn’t on the stage nor does she sing or dance so has anyone actually seen her in person? For all we know she could be the animated creation of some horny teenager’s overactive libido. If you’ve seen the recent movie version of The Jungle Book you know how lifelike and realistic the special effects people can make fantasy appear, so perhaps Ms. Kardashian falls into that category as well.

Besides, lending credence to this theory is the guy who supposedly married Kim’s mother, the 1976 Olympic decathlon champion named Bruce Jenner, now known as Caitlyn after having undergone a sex change. Talk about suspicious reality, the whole family just might be the product of someone’s fertile imagination, destined to eventually go into space to visit Mork from Ork or Ming the Merciless from planet Mongo. Wait until the Mud People get a gander at Kardashian’s mud puppies. That’s a show I wouldn’t want to miss.

Spencer

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